1736 – Francis Egerton Bridgewater was born (d. 8 Mar 1803). (Earl) Founder of British inland navigation, whose canal, built from his estates at Worsley to the city of Manchester, is called the Bridgewater canal.

1792 – Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis was born (d. 1843). French engineer and mathematician who first described the Coriolis force, an effect of motion on a rotating body, of paramount importance to meteorology, ballistics, and oceanography

1799 – Mary Anning was born (d. 9 Mar 1847). English fossil collector who made her first significant discovery at the age of 11 or 12 (sources differ on the details), when she found a complete skeleton of an Ichthyosaurus, from the Jurassic period.

1815 – William Nicholson dies (b. 1753). English chemist who discovered the electrolysis of water (2 May 1800), the first observation of a chemical reaction caused by electricity. I

1826 – Georg von Reichenbach dies (b. 24 Aug 1772). German maker of astronomical instruments who introduced the meridian, or transit, circle, a specially designed telescope for measuring both the time when a celestial body is directly over the meridian (the longitude of the instrument) and the angle of the body at meridian passage

1845 – Charles Edwin Bessey was born (d. 25 Feb 1915). American botanist who created the first U.S. undergraduate botanical experimental laboratory at Iowa State University, where he held several positions (1870-84) and inaugurated the systematic study of plant morphology in the U.S

1853 – First public aquarium: the Aquatic Vivarium, the world’s first public aquarium, was opened in Regent’s Park, London, the inspiration of an English self-taught naturalist, Philip Henry Gosse, who wrote popular illustrated books on nature, and especially marine biolog

1858 – Édouard (-Jean-Baptiste) Goursat was born (d. 25 Nov 1936). French mathematician and theorist whose contribution to the theory of functions, pseudo- and hyperelliptic integrals, and differential equations influenced the French school of mathematics.

1922 – Robert A. Good was born (d. 13 Jun 2003). American surgeon, a pioneer of modern immunology who performed the world’s first successful human bone marrow transplant (1968) from his sister to a 4-month-old baby boy with an inherited immune disorder.

1964 – James Franck dies (b. 1882). German-born physicist, Nobel Prize for Physics laureate in 1925 with Gustav Hertz for research on the excitation and ionization of atoms by electron bombardment that verified the quantized nature of energy transfer.